Polluted rivers, deforestation, noxious smokestack emissions and Chernobyl. That is
what comes to mind when we think of the former Soviet Union. Like much of the history of
the former Soviet Union, there is another side to the story. Just as there were political
alternatives to Stalin, there were alternative possibilities to the way that the planned
economy dealt with nature. Douglas R. Weiner's "Models of Nature: Ecology,
Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Union" (Indiana Univ., 1988) is, as
far as I know, the most detailed account of the efforts of the Russian government to
implement a "green" policy.

This story starts, as you would expect, with the Bolshevik revolution. While Lenin has
the reputation of being a crude "productivist," the actual record was quite the
opposite. Although Lenin wanted to increase Soviet Russia's productive power, he thought
that nature had to be respected.

The Communist Party issued a decree "On Land" in 1918. It declared all
forests, waters, and minerals to be the property of the state, a prerequisite to rational
use. When the journal "Forests of the Republic" complained that trees were being
chopped down wantonly, the Soviet government issued a stern decree "On Forests"
at a meeting chaired by Lenin in May of 1918. From then on, forests would be divided into
an exploitable sector and a protected one. The purpose of the protected zones would
specifically be to control erosion, protect water basins and the "preservation of
monuments of nature." This last stipulation is very interesting when you compare it
to the damage that is about to take place in China as a result of the Yangtze dam. The
beautiful landscapes which inspired Chinese artists and poets for millennia is about to
disappear, all in the name of heightened "productiveness."

What's surprising is that the Soviet government was just as protective of game animals
as the forests, this despite the revenue-earning possibilities of fur. The decree "On
Hunting Seasons and the Right to Possess Hunting Weapons" was approved by Lenin in
May 1919. It banned the hunting of moose and wild goats and brought the open seasons in
spring and summer to an end. These were some of the main demands of the conservationists
prior to the revolution and the Communists satisfied them completely. The rules over
hunting were considered so important to Lenin that he took time out from deliberations
over how to stop the White Armies in order to meet with the agronomist Podiapolski.

Podialpolski urged the creation of "zapovedniki", roughly translatable as
"nature preserves." Russian conservationists had pressed this long before the
revolution. In such places, there would be no shooting, clearing, harvesting, mowing,
sowing or even the gathering of fruit. The argument was that nature must be left alone.
These were not even intended to be tourist meccas. They were intended as ecological havens
where all species, flora and fauna would maintain the "natural equilibrium [that] is
a crucial factor in the life of nature."

Podiapolski recalls the outcome of the meeting with Lenin:

"Having asked me some questions about the military and political situation in the
Astrakhan' region, Vladimir Ilich expressed his approval for all of our initiatives and in
particular the one concerning the project for the zapovednik. He stated that the cause of
conservation was important not only for the Astrakhan krai, but for the whole republic as well."

Podiapolski sat down and drafted a resolution that eventually was approved by the
Soviet government in September 1921 with the title "On the Protection of Nature,
Gardens, and Parks." A commission was established to oversee implementation of the
new laws. It included a geographer-anthropologist, a mineralogist, two zoologists, an
ecologist. Heading it was Vagran Ter-Oganesov, a Bolshevik astronomer who enjoyed great
prestige.

The commission first established a forest zapovednik in Astrakhan, according to
Podiapolski's desires Next it created the Ilmenski zapovednik, a region which included
precious minerals. Despite this, the Soviet government thought that Miass deposits located
there were much more valuable for what they could teach scientists about geological
processes. Scientific understanding took priority over the accumulation of capital. The
proposal was endorsed by Lenin himself who thought that pure scientific research had to be
encouraged. And this was at a time when the Soviet Union was desperate for foreign
currency.

In my next post, I will cover the period of the NEP.

Under Lenin, the USSR stood for the most audacious approach to nature conservancy in
the 20th century. Soviet agencies set aside vast portions of the country where commercial
development, including tourism, would be banned. These "zapovedniki", or natural
preserves, were intended for nothing but ecological study. Scientists sought to understand
natural biological processes better through these living laboratories. This would serve
pure science and it would also have some ultimate value for Soviet society's ability to
interact with nature in a rational manner. For example, natural pest elimination processes
could be adapted to agriculture.

After Lenin's death, there were all sorts of pressures on the Soviet Union to adapt to
the norms of the capitalist system that surrounded and hounded it and produce for profit
rather than human need. This would have included measures to remove the protected status
of the zapovedniki. Surprisingly, the Soviet agencies responsible for them withstood such
pressures and even extended their acreage through the 1920s.

One of the crown jewels was the Askania-Nova zapovednik in the Ukranian steppes. The
scientists in charge successfully resisted repeated bids by local commissars to extend
agriculture into the area through the end of the 1920s. Scientists still enjoyed a lot of
prestige in the Soviet republic, despite a growing move to make science cost-justify
itself. Although pure science would eventually be considered "bourgeois", the
way it was in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it could stand on its own for the time
being.

The head administrator of Askania-Nova was Vladimir Stanchinksi, a biologist who sought
to make the study of ecology an exact science through the use of quantitative methods,
including mathematics and statistics. He identified with scientists in the West who had
been studying predator-prey and parasite-host relationships with laws drawn from physics
and chemistry. (In this he was actually displaying an affinity with Karl Marx, who also
devoted a number of years to the study of agriculture using the latest theoretical
breakthroughs in the physical sciences and agronomy. Marx's study led him to believe that
capitalist agriculture is detrimental to sound agricultural practices.)

Stanchinski adopted a novel approach to ecology. He thought that "the quantity of
living matter in the biosphere is directly dependent on the amount of solar energy that is
transformed by autotrophic plants." Such plants were the "economic base of the
living world." He invoked the Second Law of Thermodynamics to explain the variations
in mass between flora and fauna at the top, middle and bottom of the biosphere. Energy was
lost as each rung in the ladder was scaled, since more and more work was necessary to
procure food.

The whole purpose of the Askania-Nova was to allow scientists to observe such processes
without interference from politicians or commerce. Unfortunately, there were already
powerful forces being unleashed in Russian politics that would undermine these efforts.

They came from two sources which tended to reinforce one another. One was the sheer
need to compete in a hostile capitalist world. This meant that everything was ultimately
judged on whether it could be bought or sold. The other hostile force was the Soviet
science establishment itself that Stalin was reorienting toward a more
"utilitarian" view of nature.

Stalin had very little use for theoretical science. On the 12th anniversary of the
Bolshevik Revolution, he said, "All the objections raised by 'science' against the
possibility and expediency of organizing great grain factories of forty to fifty thousand
hectares have collapsed and crumbled to dust. Practice has refuted the objections of
'science,' and has once again shown that not only has practice to learn from 'science,'
but that 'science' also would do well to learn from practice."

(Of course, Stalin never examined the environmental consequences of such grain
factories. The dubious lessons of such models are coming under scrutiny today as soil and
water are exhausted by agribusiness, just as Marx anticipated in the 1860s.)

Eventually, Stalin and his minions began to view all pure scientists as being nuisances
at best and counter-revolutionaries at worst. He sneered that they enjoyed the sort of
"protected" status that the ecologists had achieved for the zapovedniki.
"During the twelve years of revolution, the scholars of the USSR lived as if in a
fastidiously protected zapovednik. In this All-Union zapovednik for the Endangered Species
of Bourgeois Scientists, they found cozy corners for themselves...far out of sight of
Soviet public opinion."

Stalin adapted a crude version of Marxism based on a "productivist" reading
of the Communist Manifesto. Gone was any attempt to view society and nature as in harmony.
Instead, man would conquer and tame nature like a hostile beast. Scientists and artists
were sensitive to Stalin's new views and helped him find the words to express them. Leonid
Leonov wrote a novel called "Soviet River" whose protagonist is the engineer
Uvadiev. His antagonist? Nature itself. "From the moment when Uvadiev stepped on the
bank, a challenge was cast at the River Sot'...and it seemed as though the very earth
beneath his feet was his enemy." Another square-jawed, broad-shouldered hero is the
Soviet manager Sergei Potemkin who had a dream to turn forests into newsprint. Leonov
rhapsodizes:

"Gradually...his dream had swollen...Potemkin sleeps not; he straightens and
deepens the ancient bed of rivers, increasing fourfold their carrying capacity...unties
three provinces around his industrial infant...opens a paper college...Cellulose rivers
flow to foreign lands, the percentage of cellulose in the newspaper world is tripled. The
dreams urge on reality, and reality hastens on the dreams."

(Doesn't this sound a bit like an Ayn Rand novel? Apparently this Russian emigré must
have sopped up the culture of such proletarian novels and simply transposed them to the
capitalist world.)

Another hater of nature was the hack Maxim Gorky whose novel "Belomor"
depicts the great dictator drawing up battle-plans against nature:

"Stalin holds a pencil. Before him lies a map of the region. Deserted shores.
Remote villages. Virgin soil, covered with boulders. Primeval forests. Too much forest as
a matter of fact; it covers the best soil. And swamps. The swamps are always crawling
about, making life dull and slovenly. Tillage must be increased. The swamps must be
drained...The Karelian Republic wants to enter the stage of classless society as a
republic of factories and mills. And the Karelian Republic will enter classless society by
changing its own nature."

The concrete form that subversion of the zapovedniki took was
"acclimatization." Stalin and his science whores believed that it was necessary
to import species that were not native to a region in order to maximize their value (i.e.,
commercial value.) This bone-headed idea found its most profound expression in the release
of muskrats into various regions, despite the objections of scientists who thought that
the result could be as disastrous as the import of rabbits into Australia. Muskrats might
adapt well to the steppes, but they could very easily feed on valuable fish roe as well.
What good would fur production be if salmon were destroyed in the process?

The justification for acclimatization was the same as that provided by the novelists
Leonov and Gorky. It was part of man's historical mission to conquer nature. In 1929, the
Stalinist Academician N.F. Kaschenko made a major statement on behalf of the policy. He
argued that it would not only reduce the USSR's dependence on imports but
"proletarianize" the availability of tropical fruits. The notion of growing
pineapples in the Ukraine was as foolish as the proposed muskrat project, but Stalin's
followers were not easily persuaded of their errors. Kaschenko's words epitomize the
insanity of the anti-ecology assault that was gathering steam in the USSR and which would
become official policy in less than 5 years:

"The final goal of acclimatization, understood in the broad sense, is a profound
rearrangement of the entire living world--not only that portion which is now under the
domination of humanity but also that portion that has still remained wild. Generally
speaking, all wild species will disappear with time; some will be exterminated, others
will be domesticated. All nature will live, thrive, and die at none other than the will of
humans and according to their designs. These are the grandiose perspective that open up
before us."

Louis Proyect

(This is the second and final part of Douglas Weiner's "Models of Nature: Ecology,
Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Union," Indiana Univ., 1988)